Yesterday our Environmental Philosophy class had an interesting discussion about writing first drafts. Several of the students used a vomiting metaphor to describe this stage of the writing process, as in, vomiting all your ideas out onto the page. The essays we read to start this conversation didn’t use this metaphor, but multiple small groups independently suggested it.
I think the vomiting metaphor is meant to express the sense that writing a first draft is messy and thorough. A first draft doesn’t need to tightly follow an assignment structure or other formal requirements; it’ll always have a mix of good ideas and bad ones; and it’s okay if the grammar and word choice are awkward or idiosyncratic. You also want all of your potential ideas out on paper, where you can take a closer look at them, and really figure out which ones are better or worse.
So, don’t hold back, let it all just go everywhere, and clean things up afterwards.
The thing is, vomiting is really unpleasant. No one enjoys vomiting, even if it sometimes brings some relief to an upset stomach. It’s also involuntary and uncontrolled, rather than deliberate and skillful. You don’t need to practice vomiting to get good at it. (And the idea of being good at vomiting is also pretty weird itself!)
Talking with the students, I realized that sketching is a much better metaphor for my process of writing a first draft. As in, sketching a drawing or painting.
As in the vomiting metaphor, a sketch doesn’t tightly follow formal requirements. Indeed, the point of a sketch is often to figure out the general form and composition of the image. Sketching is done quickly and lightly, with lots of little changes along the way as you figure out what does and doesn’t work. A sketch might contain variations on an element, to identify which representations of that element are better and worse.
But, unlike vomiting, sketching is a deliberate and skillful activity. It requires practice, and can involve different techniques of varying complexity and effort. It’s also often pleasant and stimulating.
Consider this blog post. I’m taking time out of a very busy day to write it, because after class I just couldn’t get “vomiting vs. sketching” out of my head. I was too excited to find a way to explain this idea to other people. And, even more importantly, I needed to work out for myself exactly what I meant, why I thought sketching was a better metaphor for my writing process. As I write, I’m coming up with even more ideas, and what was meant to be about 300 words long is now creeping towards 500 (and beyond). When I vomit, I’m not excited to keep vomiting even more.
When we make a sketch — for a drawing, a painting, or a photograph or video shot — we start with a vague, poorly-defined concept or reaction to a scene. There’s something here we want to express, but usually we’re not really sure what that something is. Sketching is the process whereby we consider different elements, seen in different ways, arranged in different compositions, hopefully working our way towards that original something. When we find it — when the sketch is successful — it has a feeling of both creation and discovery. Creation because it’s a thing we’ve created, it’s emerged out of us and now exists in the world. But also discovery, because at the start we didn’t know exactly what that something was. The sketch reveals that something to us, enabling us to share it with others but also understand it better ourselves.
For me, philosophy also starts with that something, a vague reaction to the ideas of another. Sometimes it’s vague agreement; sometimes it’s vague disagreement. Most often it’s that I don’t quite see things the way the other person does, and the something is the combination of our agreements and disagreements. Writing — sketching — is the process by which I try to discover and explain that vague reaction.
This is what philosophers mean when we say that writing is our research method.